How Alexander Pushkin once OFFENDED the emperor

It was their first meeting. The poet was brought to the city with such haste that he appeared before the emperor in his travel attire – covered in dust, exhausted and unshaven. He had arrived in Moscow from the village of Mikhailovskoye, where he had spent the previous two years.

The emperor asked the poet a direct question: Would he have taken part in the uprising of December 26, 1825, had he been in St. Petersburg? It was on that day that the men who would later become known as the Decembrists gathered in Senate Square. Pushkin did not beat about the bush; he replied that he would have been there alongside his friends. He emphasized that he did not renounce his personal ties to the Decembrists nor did he hide the fact that he shared their views. According to historical accounts, Nicholas I responded to this candor with respect, appreciating the poet’s frankness. Pushkin would later depict a similar scene in his novel ‘The Captain’s Daughter’, in which the character Pyotr Grinev speaks with equal boldness and honesty to Yemelyan Pugachev – a man who was posing as Emperor Peter III.

Memoirs also describe a second, almost anecdotal, moment from that same audience. Emboldened by the sovereign’s leniency, Pushkin began to feel more at ease and leaned against a table, almost sitting on it. In some retellings, this episode has been altered to suggest he "sat on a chair". Since the meeting took place in private – an unprecedented occurrence in Tsarist Russia – there are two versions of how the meeting unfolded: the poet’s and the emperor’s.